Evelyn Ersanilli

Evelyn Ersanilli (1980) studied Interdisciplinary Social Science at Utrecht University (The Netherlands). She specialised in welfare state and migration studies. She graduated in 2004 with her Ma thesis 'Be my guest! A comparison of Dutch and Canadian incorporation policies and the socio-economic incorporation of Iranian male immigrants in both countries'. For the Canadian part of the research, she spend seven months in Toronto, for which she received the Graduate Student Research Award by the International Council of Canadian Studies and the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs.

In April 2004 Evelyn started her Ph.D. at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam on the project "Incorporation trajectories and migration histories of Turkish immigrants to Western Europe in a cross-national perspective". This project compares structural and socio-cultural incorporation of Turkish guest-workers and their offspring in the Netherlands, France and Germany. The target group is limited to Turkish immigrants from a selected number of origin regions as to minimise the possible influence of a different make-up of the immigrant flow on incorporation outcomes.
Data are gathered by means of a phone survey and will in a later stage of the research be supplemented with in-depth interviews.
Post and transnationalists argue a diminishing importance of national ideologies and a convergence in policies is occurring which will eliminate national differences. This research aims to investigate to what extent this convergence process has occurred and to what extent different national conceptions of citizenship continue to have an (important) effect on the immigrant incorporation.